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The GOP’s Uneasy Alliance

What, me worry?

– Alfred E. Neuman

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the GOP trying to change its image with minority voters. They’ve obviously gotten the memo on demographic change and are scrambling to catch up with history. Yet, in spite of their apparent desire to change, the party just affirmed its bullheaded opposition to same sex marriage at their annual spring meeting. Apparently, the GOP is being strong-armed into acting against its long-term interests by evangelical leaders whose loyalty is necessary in order to address short term needs like maintaining a GOP House majority through the … Read more “The GOP’s Uneasy Alliance”

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The Right, The Election, And What’s Next

A while back I wrote a post called “The Party of Lincoln.” In it, I said that the GOP,

[has] become the instrument of power of a right wing movement bent on resetting the social, political, and economic clock in America to a time when women were marginalized, the rich were beyond accountability, and overt racism and racial codes were business as usual…

The majority of the Republican activist base is made up of ideologically inflexible, overlapping rightist factions. They include the Tea Parties, the religious right, libertarians, white nationalists, anti-communist conspiracy theorists, and assorted more exotic white supremacists. That’s … Read more “The Right, The Election, And What’s Next”

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The Party Of Lincoln

The Republican Convention played like conventions past, perhaps enriched by an unusual number of outright lies, but otherwise, pretty much par for the course. Planks of the platform controversial among undecided voters were avoided, attacks were launched, and the rest was pablum for the base.

So why watch? It’s a habit. I’ve been watching since the early 1990s when my work involved studying the political right wing. Keeping an eye on the GOP was critical to that work because it was then becoming and has since very much become the instrument of power of a right wing movement bent on … Read more “The Party Of Lincoln”